In Today’s Conversation, Leith Anderson and Nick Hall talk about evangelism among young people and the spirituality of young adults in America.

In his junior year of college, Nick wrote a paper about how to reach his generation with the gospel. The paper went viral and turned into a student-led movement of over 1,000 students responding to the gospel, and then spread out to other campuses, reaching more than 50,000 in just a couple years. Nick has now shared the gospel at hundreds of events to millions of students and is regularly featured as a speaker for pastors gatherings, training events and festivals around the world.

In this podcast, you’ll hear Leith and Nick discuss:

The state of evangelism in the United States today;

Nick's personal calling as an evangelist;

What young people want in a local church;

Messages that help reach the younger generation for Christ; and

How evangelism and discipleship work together.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: Let’s talk about you. And let’s talk about young evangelists. It seems to me that there were more evangelists a generation ago then there are today. So, are there many of you out there?

Nick: You know, that’s a good question. I don’t know if there’d be many who want to claim to be like me. I don’t know I’m the cool kid, so I’m not sure if there’d be many that would want that reputation. But it is an interesting time. As you said, it seems like a generation before maybe the word “evangelist” — or being in that vocation — was a more prominent field. And I would say it’s certainly true that fewer and fewer people seem to be grabbing onto that vocation, or mantle, or whatever you want to call it. There are a few people out there certainly that we know of, but we really feel like it’s a church kind of dynamic where the church has kind of stopped talking about the evangelist as a vocation. And so I believe that there are just as many evangelists as there always was, because God hasn’t stopped calling these different offices and different people in the Church. But I think that the Church has maybe stopped making as much of an emphasis on that vocation, largely probably in reaction to some of the negative things that happened in previous generations — whether it be prosperity or scandal or whatever else. But it seems to be not exactly the most popular word when you say “evangelist” today.

Leith: Well, let’s trace your journey. So you start out writing a college paper — I wonder when you were writing it if you ever imagined the impact that it would have — and then from that college paper to full-time evangelism and worldwide ministry. How did this work? What’s the trajectory here?

Nick: Yeah, well, at the end of the day — I think as in so many things — as God calls, and God enables, and God opens doors. You know, for me I was 19 years old, I was a freshman in college, and God really was rearranging my life around this calling towards evangelism and being an evangelist. And the only guy I knew of who was an evangelist was Billy Graham. And you know, you talk to young people today they don’t know who Billy Graham is. But for me, I knew that his book was on my grandparents’ coffee table, and I knew my parents used to have Billy Graham crusades on the television at home. And so I read his biography cover to cover and started praying, and God really gave me this statement of “My life exists to put Christ at the pulse of a generation.” Hence, where the word “pulse” came in, was really from this statement.

And so, as you said, I really wrote this paper in my English class. I was a junior when that happened — a secular university back in North Dakota — and really from there, God just began opening doors. I was traveling with the Billy Graham and Luis Palau teams, and really learning under these individuals that had been my heroes — travelin...